The article discusses two books representing women's voices in defense of women's education and work which somehow reverberated in Brazil in the 19th century: Opúsculo humanitário (1853), by the Brazilian writer Nísia Floresta (1809 or 1810-1885), and Mulheres e crianças (1880), by the Portuguese writer Maria Amália Vaz de Carvalho (1847-1921). We tried to identify to whom the texts were written and how they justified women's authorship and scholarship in a time when the traditional prohibition of public speech and of the press to women began to be questioned.